Sidney

Sidney

@justsid.bsky.social

I cosplay as a senior engine programmer at Laminar Research. Working on X-Plane and losing all the devices.

63 followers60 following149 posts

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

I suppose the one good thing about being a programmer right now is that I'm not a mathematician. I don't have that sorta alcohol budget

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

So, what kinda job does one go into in their mid 30s after spending an entire career as a programmer? Looking around, everything even close in salary range obviously requires prior experience or degrees in different fields. I’m under no illusion that I’m badly specced, but where do my skills work?

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

Given that everyone in and around tech has gone insane, I propose we turn the internet off for a week and all go touch grass.

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

The Apple developer site is so good. When you log in it requires a code send by SMS and then gives you a prompt asking if you want to trust this browser. That prompt does nothing, you will still be auto logged out and have to enter the SMS MFA code again. Trillion dollar company!

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

I was today years old when I realized that you can specify the overload std::clamp() and co should pick. I've always done something like std::clamp(foo, int16_t(0), int16_t(bar + 1)), but std::clamp<int16_t>(foo, 0, bar) gets rid of all the ugly casts from type promotion.

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

In hindsight this is blindingly obvious and I feel like an absolute idiot, yet somehow I never considered that this obviously works. Probably common knowledge to everyone already, but I only cosplay as a senior C++ developer so this revelation only just hit me.

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

Takes quite a bit of guts to claim its a-okay to inhale every piece of human content ever made without paying for it and then turn around and cry foul when somebody else distills the resulting product into their own.

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

No shade at AMD (okay maybe a little), but before putting an MCP server into RGD, it’d be real nice to actually make RGD functional. I have not been able to catch one device loss with it, ever. Also the fact that it can’t be embedded like Aftermath for in the field diagnostics isn’t helping either.

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

Local graphics programmer discovers this one weird trick for fast tracking merge requests that Big Code Review doesn't want you to know about.

Sidney reposted

Jb Evain
@jb.evain.net

Replying to @sharlock93.bsky.social

(fun fact only slightly related that not everyone seems to know, you can also use: `ptr,10` to view a pointer as an array of 10 elements)

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

Two Vulkan variable shading rate gotchas: On Nvidia, shading rate attachments get cleared to 0 after a dynamic rendering pass. On AMD, enabling pipeline shading rates disables MSAA completely even if the rate is set to 1x1. In unrelated news, guess who shipped VRS with MSAA and dynamic rendering.

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

Ran into this guy while out for a walk. He kept trying to fly away but it looked like he was caught on something, so I got a bit closer to see if he was injured. Nope, just a big, heavy fish. Sorry to have disturbed your lunch, buddy!

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

It’s 2026 and I just put in an alert box for the Raptor Lake instability issue into X-Plane. It was quiet for a while but it looks like those CPUs are back with a vengeance now, at least based on our crash reporter and support data. Cue the “all other games work fine, this is your fault” arguing

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

As a person with a password manager, the friction of "We sent you a code to your email to login with" is insane. Can we just go back to passwords, please? The worst are the sites that want username/email + password and then send you an email.

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

And don't get me started on the ones that use SMS MFA. The absolute worst. Fun fact, my phone carrier sends SMS MFA (kinda makes sense, I guess), but won't actually deliver it if, let's say, your credit card expired and the monthly payment failed. I know, crazy unforeseeable edge case.

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

They also don't deliver SMS while abroad, so when I was in Europe last year I was unable to login into a few accounts because of this. But it's also one of those invisible failure modes, so good luck figuring out what happened and why nothing works.

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

Something that I've worked on is being shown at GDC, which is just hella cool. Wish our southern neighbours weren't so weird at the moment, I would've loved to be there in person. www.theverge.com/games/892436...

theverge.comApple’s Vision Pro will support playing iRacing and X-Plane from the cloud soon.During GDC on Tuesday, Nvidia announced that visionOS 26.4, expected later this spring, will include support for Nvidia’s XR streaming platform CloudXR 6.0, allowing users to play games like X-Plane 1...
Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

Windows Defender is apparently now marking netcat as a naughty program and just deletes it. Unfortunately that breaks shader reloading in X-Plane because that uses the built-in telnet server to execute the commands. Thanks Microsoft, it's the third time I'm downloading netcat again...

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

Of course Slack also needs to shove AI into everything whether anyone wants it or not. And of course the "Don't ask again" button doesn't work. Not in the sense that it ignores your request, it literally can't be clicked. The state of software these days is absolutely disgusting.

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

Had an absolute blast at GPC! Met a bunch of awesome people, all of them super nice. Also really nice to finally be able to put a face to an avatar for some. Really wish I could’ve stayed for the final bash instead of immediately running back to the airport.

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

TIL that the Discovery tab is just a feed that can be unsubscribed from. Afterwards it no longer hangs around the tab area of the Home page. Dunno about everyone else but mine was an absolute train wreck of terrible hot takes, NSFW content and AI evangelists. Bsky is a lot more peaceful without it.

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

From a graphics programmer standpoint, Liquid Glass is so cool. Doing this effect in real time on a consumer phone is so cool. As a phone user though, what the actual fuck? Why are they shipping me a cool tech demo?

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

Sometimes it's easy to forget how far things have come. I'm putting some screenshots of various X-Plane versions together for no particular reason and the difference between v12 and v11 is wild. The v11 to v10 difference is a lot harder to see in this view but still there.

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

Until then, the difference in the clouds and general lighting is even more noticeable at dawn/dusk. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but compute, yo, it's crazy powerful! (Once more v12, v11 and v10)

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

We have a quarterly user survey about feature requests and issues they would like to see fixed (it's always better AA and more perf), but this time around there apparently was a large enough crowd to get "AMD CrossFire support" on the board. I have extremely bad news for those users...

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

Looks like I’ll be giving a talk about working on X-Plane at GPC 🥳. Covering how we went from a GL 2.1(!) codebase to a modern Vulkan/Metal one and the challenges and advantages of working on a single product for 30 years, with an eye on the unique challenges of a small studio working on flight sims

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

Flight sims are super fascinating projects (citation needed, author is heavily biased). One extremely large level, the main character is crazy fast and there are tons of mods/plugins/scenery add-ons. Should be fun, I hope 😄

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

I’ve been enjoying doing CAD work on the Surface with a pen, but the keyboard has been incredibly awkward. Figured this was a good opportunity to finally use one of the Pico Pis collecting dust and make a macro pad thingy. Quite pleased with how it turned out.

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

Made the mistake of looking at the Hacker News comments on the preliminary report of the Air India crash. People who regularly rant about managers demanding features with no understanding of the problem space are now seriously saying “planes should just not allow actions that can crash it” 🙄

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

Fun quirk of first gen Maxwell GPUs: If you have a f16 render target, output to it won’t be clamped to the highest f16 value but instead overflows into INF. This gets particular fun when you turn on blending and no amount of shader side clamping can save you.

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

It’s one of those insidious bugs that keeps popping up ever so often since no sane developer wants to use a 980 as their daily dev GPU. We colour NaNs/INFs magenta in the final render to make debugging easier and if I see a bug report with 9xx and magenta in the title, I know we screwed up again.

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

Also when I wrote first gen I really meant second gen. First gen might do this too though, but thankfully it’s out of the support matrix and thus not my problem anymore.

Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social

Honestly, forget about AI tools. The trifecta of power tools for game engine development is RenderDoc, Superluminal and Live++. Hands down the most bang for your buck you can ever get and RenderDoc in particular is criminally underpriced.

Sidney reposted

Ari Arnbjörnsson
@flassari.bsky.social

Tired of debugging optimized code with missing variables and inlined functions? @visualstudio.com preview now has Dynamic Debugging which automatically unoptimizes functions you step into while debugging 👀 Available in UE 5.6, or with a simple cherry pick: devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/cpp-...

devblogs.microsoft.comC++ Dynamic Debugging: Full Debuggability for Optimized Builds - C++ Team BlogOver the past 5 years, we’ve had many incredible opportunities to engage with game developers. From AAA studios to indie developers, the passion for slashing iteration times is significant. Amidst all...

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